Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network

Emmett Duffy

Emmett Duffy is Director of the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories Network, and coordinates the Marine Global Earth Observatory (MarineGEO) program. MarineGEO is a community of partners using a common toolkit to understand how coastal marine ecosystems work and why they are changing. Emmett is a marine biologist who has worked in seagrass and coral reef ecosystems around the world and is active in international scientific networks and syntheses linking biodiversity to ecosystem services and human well-being. He came to the Smithsonian in 2013 after 19 years at the College of William and Mary’s Virginia Institute of Marine Science, where he was the Glucksman Professor of Marine Science. He was awarded an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship in 2006, Japan’s inaugural Kobe Prize in Marine Biology in 2011, a Virginia Outstanding Faculty award in 2013, and was elected a Fellow of the Ecological Society of America in 2017. He has contributed to major scientific syntheses linking biodiversity to ecosystem health, the US National Climate Assessment in 2013, and has led visioning for development of Marine Biodiversity Observation Networks. Duffy received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1989.